The emergence of a distinct warrior ideology across most parts of Europe occurred in the Bronze Age, marking a profound change in the management of conflict within prehistoric societies. Between the mid third and early first millennium BCE metal evolved from a rare commodity to a common resource used for violent activities, most notably in the form of swords, spears, shields and armour created for battle. Becoming increasingly common by the later part of this period, the scale and complexity of fortified sites transformed the organisation of violence in communities while also reshaping relationships between the built environment and societies by formalising inclusive and exclusive spaces in new ways. The people living through this period of change experienced violence in many venues, with bones preserving the most direct evidence. Violence as commemorated in art is illustrative of how the different societies of Europe understood its social purpose. Our sources demonstrate that across Europe children, women and men could be brutally attacked by weapons ranging from slings and arrows, suited to hunting, to swords and spears, designed for war. This chapter focuses mainly on changes in warfare-related violence due to the wealth of material remains suited to exploring this theme.

The fifth century BCE exhibited what has generally been termed ‘gang violence’: that is, the deployment of (relatively) well-organised gangs of lower-class men by elite figures, such as Publius Clodius Pulcher and Titus Annius Milo, in their pursuit of specific political purposes. This chapter analyses this phenomenon from the larger perspectives of self-help in Rome, the political violence that had begun to affect Roman civic life in the second century BCE (intensified by the civil war of the eighties BCE), and by way of the institutional and social features of Roman life (e.g. clientele and collegia) that facilitated the creation and exploitation of gangs. It concludes with innovations introduced by Augustus which effectively brought an end to gang violence in the city of Rome.

Violence played a significant role in Roman identity, and images of war and violence were pervasive throughout the Roman world. The myths and history of Rome are filled with brutal acts of rape, fratricide and war. Scenes of violence appear in nearly every medium of representation in both public and private settings, on grand public monuments and small, personal objects. A Roman house might have images of violence on its walls and floors, with subjects ranging from mythological brutality to gladiatorial combats or military conquest. Violent myth and battle scenes adorned tombs and sarcophagi, and of course, triumphal monuments bearing scenes of victory and conquest stood in public spaces for all to admire. Although domestic, funerary and public representations of war and violence had specific functions within their contexts, they exhibit commonalities. Violent images were a means of visualising power in the Roman world. They served as reminders of Roman power structures: the power of citizens over non-citizens; the power of Roman men over women, children, slaves and clients; and the power of the emperor over his subjects as well as foreigners and anyone who threatened the welfare of Rome.

Warfare in the deep past was pervasive and deadly. To understand the past, warfare must be considered as deadly conflict between independent polities and not the type of weapons and sizes of fighting forces. In spite of their limitations, the archaeological record and early historical ethnographic records provide considerable evidence relevant to warfare. From this we can conclude warfare was deadlier as a proportion of the males dying of warfare than in recent centuries. In particular, warfare among foragers (hunters and gatherers) was much more common than generally perceived. There is no evidence that there were long intervals of time, for any society in the past, when there was no warfare; or, put another way, there were no peaceful societies for any great length of time. The impact warfare had on societies, what caused changes in the intensity of warfare, and did it lead to selection for traits that resulted in warfare success, is discussed. In particular, the impact of climate change and competition over scarce resources are seen as key factors in ancient warfare.

Although there has been a tendency in modern scholarship on the Roman Empire in late antiquity (early third to early seventh century BCE) to view the period through the lens of transformation rather than violent upheaval, warfare undoubtedly became more frequent, at least compared with the first two centuries BCE, and impacted on regions of the empire long insulated from significant military conflict. The empire of late antiquity faced more significant external challenges, as well as more regular bouts of civil war. Increased use of archery, with its potential to inflict mass casualties, was a distinctive feature of battle in this period; siege warfare became more common, so that civilian populations experienced the violence of war more directly; and expansion in the size of the army placed increased pressures on recruitment and logistical support – pressures which resulted in greater use of force by the state to maintain the military establishment. Changes in the structure of the army also meant that troops were more frequently billeted on the civilian population, who thereby became more exposed to casual violence at the hands of their own troops. In these different ways, late antiquity can be considered a period of Roman history when military violence became more prevalent.

Attitudes towards what we term ‘domestic violence’ are hard to locate in the ancient Greek sources, but they do emerge in a variety of literary and artistic genres which span several centuries. This chapter explores some of the key evidence and, utilising anthropological theory, asks what kind of violent treatment women received at the hands of male relations, and why. Issues of honour and shame surface as key causes, and the chapter explores the fragility of male and familial codes of conduct and the consequences of their infringement. It becomes clear that the sources on violence towards women are not so infrequently encountered as to suggest that violence did not occur often, but show that violence towards women was so matter of fact that it barely deserved mention.

The chapter examines the broad contours of violence in the Roman world, from the private, personal plane of violence in social relations (where self-help was the order of the day) to criminality and the law, to the ideological underpinnings of applying violence to those perceived as threats to the community. Various facets of the Romans’ socio-political landscape had an impact on how they viewed and practised violence. Romans had an ideology of dominance inherent in empire. They accepted the brutalities of mass slavery, a hierarchical social system that ranked people according to group membership and assigned personal worth (or lack of it) based on that membership. Violence reflected and enforced these systems. What emerges is a picture of a world where violence was, in no small measure, the language of rank and status.

It has become conventional among conservative ‘clash of civilization’ thinkers to assume that Greek victory in the Persian Wars constituted the founding act of western civilization, and that what Herodotus’s Histories are good for is to recount the origins of what Anthony Pagden calls the ‘perpetual enmity’ between East and West. Even many popularly oriented books written by highly respected classicists opt for sensationalizing titles that might attract readers whose views tend in this direction, or who admired the ‘300’ movies. There is unquestionably a tradition of reading Herodotus in this way, which may have its origins in the Enlightenment – Voltaire, for example, in a brief excursus on the uses of Herodotus, said that the main thing one learned from the Father of History was the ‘superiority of a small, generous people, free while all of Asia was enslaved’. We can find it elaborated by nineteenth-century liberals, such as J. S. Mill, who famously claimed that ‘Even as an event in English history, the battle of Marathon is more important than the battle of Hastings. Had the outcome of that day been different, the Britons and Saxons might still be roaming in the woods.’ Even in the twentieth century – full to bursting with innumerable barbarisms inflicted by the West on itself, and on ‘the rest’ – this sensationalist, Graecophile reading of the Histories has had many advocates. Benjamin Isaac, writing in 2004, cited upwards of a dozen classicists, ranging from J. B. Bury in 1909 to Oswyn Murray in 1980, invoking – positively – a supposedly Herodotean dichotomy between East and West, barbarity and culture, Asia and Europe. In the wake of the wars, Murray contended, an ‘iron curtain had descended: east against west, despotism against liberty – the dichotomies created in the Persian Wars echo throughout world history, and seem ever more likely to continue’. Samuel P. Huntington, author of the widely discussed Clash of Civilizations (1993), argued that this curtain has never been, and can never be, raised.

Athletic competition played an important role in ancient Greek and Roman culture. From the earliest days, competitive athletics included the combat sports of boxing, wrestling and pankration. Though athletic combat sports continued during the Roman period along with the increase in agonistic festivals and retained their popularity and importance, the spectacle of gladiatorial combat itself also spread throughout the Roman Empire, including the Greek eastern sections. Combat sports presented the spectator with extreme acts of violence which were potentially even fatal. But that violence was controlled and purposive. It took place in ceremonial contexts – funerals, or religious festivals primarily – with athletes wearing special uniforms: nudity in the case of combat athletes and identifiable armaments for gladiators. The fights were not violent chaos or murderous free-for-alls, but regulated and controlled by rules and expectations, all monitored by referees and the watching people themselves. These games were able to give visible expression to the values and ideology at the heart of Greek and Roman societies: courage, skill and discipline, perseverance to victory against all adversity and at all costs, even one’s life, and the ostentatious demonstration of personal excellence. The public nature of the performances is critical: it must be seen to be legitimised. Victory in such combat was worthy of immortality.

This chapter employs the ‘mindful body’ and ‘web of violence’ models to survey the range of violence present in Britain during the Iron Age and Roman periods (ninth century BCE – fifth century CE). By recognising that in a community all forms of violence are interrelated and frequently share many causative factors, these models allow for indirect forms to be included (e.g. health inequalities). Iron Age Britain was inhabited by tribal communities, and the results are dominated by young adult males, who have the majority of the evidence for organised conflict, reflecting the presence of a warrior elite. Females and children show evidence for performative violence, with their bodies being broken down and transformed in complex rituals. Bioarchaeological data suggests an absence of evidence for abuse against children, older people and women. After the Roman conquest of 43 CE the evidence for age-, sex- and status-based inequalities substantially increases, and these are much more clearly defined and observable in the primary source and bioarchaeological evidence, particularly enslavement. Overall, health declines, and evidence for the abuse of vulnerable groups increases, principally in females. Ritual violence continues and is attested in deposits of disarticulated body parts associated with sacred spaces, including cemeteries.

The geographical extent of Europe has been an unstable and shifting concept since the age of Herodotus. Where should the boundaries of Europe be drawn? Which natural or artificial markers should determine its size? What claims have been made about the European land mass and its connection to neighbouring continents such as Asia? Along with geography, the identity of Europe also seems to have been flexible for centuries. Anthony Pagden writes, ‘Like all identities it is a construction, an elaborate palimpsest of stories, images, resonances, collective memories, invented and carefully nurtured traditions.’ Across the generations, thinkers have variously stressed Europe’s classical Graeco-Roman, Christian and Jewish currents. Critics and commentators speak also of Europe’s debt to the cultures of Asia, Africa and the Americas, to Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, and it seems that no coherent sense of Europe’s identity is easily stated or accepted. Another way of putting all this is to say that Europe’s geographical co-ordinates and its cultural identity have been contested for centuries, into our own time.

This chapter provides an overview of sites of mass violence from Early Neolithic central Europe. It focuses on the Linearbandkeramik (LBK), for which several such sites are now known, more than on other Neolithic cultures. It seems that the victims of mass violence were buried, if at all, by inclusion in disorganised mass graves without any sign of post-mortem care. This indicates intentional non-conformity to the usual burial practices of the LBK and thereby wilful neglect of the funerary expression of victims’ individual cultural identities. So far, every newly discovered mass-violence site has revealed new facets of violent behaviour, including likely evidence for massacres, selected capture, torture, mutilation and systematic execution. The bioarchaeological complexity of these mass-violence sites necessitates highly comparative approaches for their interpretation that incorporate all sites where human remains have been deposited as well as their periodic reappraisal. Currently, warfare seems to be the most plausible reason for most of the group violence encountered in the LBK, especially the drastic massacres of settled communities. LBK massacre victims are characterised by perimortem cranial injuries, careless deposition in settlement contexts, lack of post-mortem attention, and the suppression of their cultural identity.

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the role played by ethnography in perceptions of the opposition between Herodotus and Thucydides and of the development of Greek historiography. From a vast range of possible evidence, I have selected a number of writers, some influential in their own right, some simply representative of their age. I will focus in turn on the place of ethnography in narratives of the development of historiography, in views of Herodotus’s own work and in comparisons between Herodotus and Thucydides. This reception history will show how views of the ancient development of the genre of historiography were influenced by new conceptions of history in the modern world, in particular by the new forms of historicism that develop over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Besides its inherent intellectual interest, the story unfolded here is important for its continued influence on modern scholarship. In the context of this volume, it provides a firm basis for understanding the instances of Herodotean reception which are explored in subsequent chapters. From the chapter as a whole it will emerge not only that histories of historiography, as much as any other form of historical writing, are moulded by the concerns of the historian’s present but also, and perhaps more unexpectedly, that ethnography, a practice often criticized as a vehicle of demarcation and exclusion, has itself become a target of exclusionary rhetoric in modern accounts of historiography.

This chapter examines the origins and early history of violence in the Japanese Islands, focusing on the Jomon (c. 14,500–900 BCE) and Yayoi (c. 900 BCE– 250 CE) periods. For several reasons the Japanese archipelago is a good place to think about links between violence and historical change. It possesses a long sequence of hunter-gatherer settlement that can contribute to ongoing debates over violence and agriculture. Hunter-gatherers in the Japanese Islands display great diversity due to both ecological and historical factors. The fact that many in prehistoric Japan were engaged in plant cultivation, leads us to a third factor: if agriculture was an important stimulus behind organised warfare, then at what point along the continuum between forager cultivation and full-scale farming did violence take on that new mantle? Finally, the position of Japan at the periphery of the East Asian world system offers the opportunity to investigate the role of ‘tribal zone’ and similar colonial processes in contexts very different from those theorised in the existing literature.